1. FIELD OF THE INVENTION
This invention relates to apparatus and means for ejecting a single sheet from a stack of sheets in a tray and particularly to methods and apparatus wherein sheets are ejected singly to be collated with other sheets ejected singly.
2. PRIOR ART
The collator art of highly developed and numerous methods and means have been devised to ensure that when the active collation proceeds, only one sheet from a stack of identical sheets is ejected from a tray to be collated with other sheets. Unfortunately, it is frequent that several sheets rather than one are ejected from a tray simultaneously. It also occurs that instead of a single sheet being ejected from a stack of sheets in a tray, the active ejection of a single sheet fails altogether and the collated groups of different sheets has one or more missing sheets. It is believed that the ejection of a single sheet from a stack of sheets in a tray is defeated at times by the fact that superposed sheets in juxtaposition with each other adhere to each other because of a vacuum between them so that any ejection method or device should accomplish the breaking of the interface vacuum between the sheets. A single sheet feeding device, aside from use in collators, is useful for non-collating devices where a single sheet is fed, e.g. duplicators, copiers, etc.